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The Life and Times of Lincoln Perry
Pantheon
October 2005
352 pages
ISBN: 0375423826
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
The first African American movie star, Lincoln Perry,
a.k.a. Stepin Fetchit, is an iconic figure in the history
of American popular culture. In the late 1920s and ’30s he
was both renowned and reviled for his surrealistic
portrayals of the era’s most popular comic stereotype—the
lazy, shiftless Negro. After his breakthrough role in the
1929 film Hearts in Dixie, Perry was hailed as “the best
actor that the talking pictures have produced” by the
critic Robert Benchley. Having run away from his Key West home in his early teens,
Perry found success as a vaude-
villian before making his way to California. The tall,
lanky actor became the first millionaire black movie star
when he appeared in a string of hit movies as the whiny,
ever-perplexed, slow-talking comic sidekick. Perry was the
highest paid and most popular black comedian in America
during Hollywood’s Golden Age, but his ongoing battles with
movie executives, his rowdy offscreen behavior, and his
extravagant spending kept him in gossip-column headlines.
Perry’s spendthrift ways and exorbitant lifestyle hastened
his decline and, in 1947, having squandered or given away
his fortune, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. In 1964 Perry was discovered in the charity ward of
Chicago’s Cook County Hospital; he later turned up in
Muhammad Ali’s entourage. In 1972 he unsuccessfully sued
CBS for defamation because of a television program that
ridiculed the type of characters he had portrayed. But his
achievements were eventually acknowledged: in 1976 the
Hollywood chapter of the NAACP gave him its Special Image
Award for having opened the door for many a succeeding
African American film star, and in 1978 he was inducted
into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame. In Stepin Fetchit,
Mel Watkins has given us the first definitive, full-scale
biography of an entertainment legend.
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